Reid’s Senate Farce

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is on a roll. Before the Senate’s Easter recess, he was all up in arms about confirming Michelle Friedland to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He wanted to delay the recess to get her through. After much hoopla, the vote was finally rescheduled for the Senate’s return on the 28th.

There is no reasonable justification for Reid’s antics. He has already tampered with the confirmation process to rig the system in the majority’s favor. If you remember, Reid broke the rules of the Senate to change cloture rules and make it possible to move nominations with a simple majority. Yet he is still acting as if he is not able to get people through, even when his bogus charge of “unprecedented obstruction by Republicans” has been disproven by the evidence.

His petty meltdowns, of course, serve the purpose of steering us away from what should be the real issue before the Senate: the record of Michelle Friedland. Miss Friedland is yet another radical liberal soldier with an impressive record of activism that would make her a great candidate for liberal political office, but that raises great doubt about her fitness for a judicial position.

Friedland has a distorted view of the proper role of a judge. As Chief Justice John Roberts famously said during his confirmation hearings:

Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role.

Friedland, on the other hand, appears to buy into the idea of judges as the catalysts for “progress.” In an essay titled, “Disqualification or Suppression: Due Process and the Response to Judicial Campaign Speech,” Friedland argues that rights are really what judges say they are and not what the legislatures — the proper branch of government that writes law — enacts. She writes: “There is no independent truth about the content of rights in state constitutions. … The rights are no more than what enforceable judgments of the state courts say they are.”

It should be no surprise then that Friedland has worked tirelessly to promote the idea of judges imposing their view of lesbian, “gay,” bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) “rights” above and beyond what the constitution and the properly enacted law of the land says. She actually received the ACLU of Southern California’s LGBT Award for her work against Proposition 8, the properly enacted state constitutional amendment that defined marriage in California as the union between one man and one woman.

Friedland’s activism in this area led her to work for “Equality California” pro bono in support of California Senate Bill 1172. That measure prohibits license counselors from helping persons under 18 who want to get rid of their same-sex attractions. Even though therapists usually defer to their patients on what their goals for therapy are, Friedland and other LGBT right supporters do not want them to have that freedom, believing they should only be affirmed in their undesired attractions. She argued, “Plaintiffs have no credible claim to harm from not being able to receive a discredited and dangerous ‘treatment.’”

There is little doubt of where Friedland stands in the clash between our First Amendment freedoms and the new-found LGBT “rights.”

These are legitimate issues of concern that explain Republican opposition and also why Reid wants to rig the system instead of making his arguments. The Huffington Post reported he wondered out loud whether they should have gone further with the illegal changes to the rules:

“Where would we be in this country without having changed that rule?” Reid asked. “We’re slogging through these rules on these nominations. It’s kind of slow because of the inordinate amount of time that we’re caused to eat up. But the longer that my friend from Iowa talks [GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley], the more reason is that maybe we should have changed the rules more than we did.”

But Reid’s petty meltdowns are being exposed by the fact that he is losing his own base. The Huffington Post quotes Senate aides sayingReid caved on the vote because, “Everyone just left town.” Reid has really become the crazy uncle in the Senate family. Every reasonable person, regardless of political affiliation, can see right through his phony rhetoric. Some may excuse it or justify it, but there is no denying its “fakeness.”

His latest gaffe was saying that all those supporting Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s fight against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) were “domestic terrorists.” Everyone knows Reid is just bloviating. The many questions regarding his personal connections with Nevada land projects aside, he is just stirring the pot with zero credibility.

Not too long ago, he took to the Senate floor to wildly claim that all the stories about people losing insurance due to ObamaCare were, “all of them untrue.” All “lies,” he said, all “absolutely false,” and “stories made up from whole cloth.”

Reid’s hysterics would be laughable, except for the fact that the Democrats have chosen him as their leader and, therefore, his exploits affect everything the Senate does or doesn’t do. And that says it all, doesn’t it?

Author

Mario Díaz, Esq., serves as Concerned Women for America's (CWA) Legal Counsel. Mr. Diaz is a Constitutional Law expert who focuses on CWA's core issues: religious liberty, sanctity of human life, defense of the family, sexual exploitation, education, national sovereignty, and support for Israel. His columns appear regularly in a variety of publications, including The Washington Times, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker and The Blaze.

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